Cautionary Tales For Children
Wonderful witty poems great for reading to your children. The stories and rhymes will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

Research has shown how important YOU are to your children and how as a dad the things you do, and keep on doing, really count, whether you live with them, or you are a single dad and are only able see them once a month, once a week or more, what you do really matters. This site is dedicated to all dads but will be of special relevance to the single dad. Remember, you are half the reason your children exist and they need you whether you live with them or not. As their dad, you have what it takes to make their lives successful and fulfilling no matter how often you see them. This site is about all the positive things that we as parents have to offer our children.

Polymorph (Shape Lock, US)

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Plastic chips that soften at about 60įC (in hot water) and can be moulded by hand before setting rock hard.
This homework assignment was completed in an evening (about 90 minutes) thanks to Polymorphís rapid melting and hardening cycle using just hot water, and was immense fun for both dad and son.. . .
I stumbled across Polymorph in the Maplins (UK) catalogue and thought it might come in handy for something or other. In the US this product is branded as the products, Shape Lock, and Friendly Plastic). Itís great for moulding small components, robot hands, robot, doll or puppet faces or dolls house items for example. We used it most recently to make the White Blood Cell for a homework assignment.. . .Itís a very low melting point plastic, that sets as tough as polypropylene (itís almost indestructible when itís set). A useful quantity (250g), in granule form, only costs about £10 ($10 in the US). When you want to use it you just put the granules in a jug and pour boiling water over them. After about two minutes in the hot water the granules which started out opaque white, go transparent, start to agglomerate and soften (itís softening temperature is approximately 60C (160F). Once it is transparent, you pour the water away (none is absorbed at all), and the lump of plastic can be taken from the jug and molded to any shape. When hot, it is very malleable and yet it is just about cool enough to manipulate with your bare hands. However, younger children should not be allowed to handle the hot plastic, and children of 12 years and over will need some supervision.. . .
The hot plastic may be formed easily and holds its shape reasonably well once formed while it is setting. However, it is not a perfect modeling clay (which ideally would be perfectly plastic), because there is a degree of elasticity to its behavior. Nevertheless the brilliant thing about it is that within a few minutes as it cools, it quickly hardens into a very tough rigid white plastic. It is completely reusable. If you are not happy with the result, simply return it to the hot water and it softens again.. . .
The product specification and instructions claim that you can machine the hardened plastic. I would beg to differ on this point. The average person's home machining tools are not water cooled, and so the typical equipment like electric drills and jigsaws that you might use, will generate so much heat in the process of machining, from friction, that the material rapidly goes over its softening point and it becomes impossible to get a good finish. In addition to that, itís far too tough to carve with a knife when it is set. In fact, attempting to do so could be very dangerous if the piece is not held down properly because it is very slippery. My advice is to use Polymorph to make selected components within your model and aim to make them entirely by molding in the few minutes of soft-time you have after you have heated the material.. . .
Once you are happy with the result, the hardened material can be coloured in using permanent markers, or painted with acrylic tube or spray paint.
Ploymorph may be bought from a Maplin store or by on-line mail order in the UK, go to Maplin online store here ,or if you live in the US you can buy the US version, Shapelock online from Shapelock.com here. Have fun.

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We can't wait to see the pictures of what youíve made. Kids love it when the things you made together are published, so go on upload a picture of what you made. It's easy, just go to your dadcando My Page and upload your pictures into this project and we'll put one of them right here in the project picture gallery.

To give you the higest quality and the shortest download time, most of our downloads are supplied in Adobe PDF format for your convenience. Adobe Reader is standard on most computers, but if you do not have it, you can get the most up to date version free from Adobe, here.

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Making stuff is fun!

I have yet to meet a child (or in fact an adult) who didn't enjoy some form of creativity. Everyone is born with an innate desire to invent, create and make things, that's why humans have been so successful. Children are the most creative individuals you can ever hope to meet, with wonderfully flexible minds and amazing powers of imagination.

Children make stories and invent games and play for hours from the most basic starting points. If a piece of paper can be an areoplane, then a scrumpled piece of paper can be a crash-landed airplane. As their dad, you are in a unique position to help develop your children's creativity and problem solving abilities using the ever resourceful child in you.

Powerful stuff
when combined with the practical
skills you have learned and mastered as an adult. Dadcando.com has loads of exciting making and doing projects. For some youíll only need five minutes, with others, whole afternoons will dissolve away. Some of the projects need only a piece of paper, while for others you will need some old packaging junk and some basic making equipment. Some projects are easy whereas others will help you and your children develop more advanced scratch building skills.

The Project instructions on dadcando are high quality, and whichever projects you download, youíll find that all the Project Instructions have been carefully designed to be very clear, and for the most part very cheap to make because the bits you need to make the model cost nothing or are free bits of rubbish that you would normally throw away!

Youíll find that not only are all our projects completely original, but they are all designed to be fun and relevant to kids.
The projects have been designed with you in mind. Quick easy with really satifying results, so that even if time is short you can get the most out of the time you have together.
Making and doing with your kids is about giving your children the most valuable thing you can give them, your time. Our Making projects are about solving problems together and having something at the end to keep and play with. Anything you make with your children will be very special to them because you spent the time together making it and they have something to keep that they can be proud of.

Most of the instructions come with printer patterns to make sure that all the things you make look as good as possible. Print them out at A4 or US Letter size on an ink jet or laser printer. Depending on the speed of your connection, some of them may take a little longer to download (although none of them are much bigger than a megabyte, and most are much smaller). This is because we only want you to use downloads of the highest quality, so we think that the wait (if there is any) will be worth it.

Happy making!

Featured Project

MicroCards
MicroCards are
miniature playing cards that can be printed out on one sheet of paper.
Just cut them out and play on the go!